Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Hillary Clinton's foreign policy experience grossly exaggerated

Former State Department Policy Planning Office Director Greg Craig has written a thorough piece detailing how most of Hillary Clinton's examples of foreign policy experience in the '90s in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and China are exaggerated.

Craig says that "She did not sit in on National Security Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security staff. She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign governments, whether they were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis. As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue - not at 3 AM or at any other time of day."